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The moment Rembrandt signed the documents turning the Silver Bullion Mine over to Sleed Hendricks, the marshal released Jenna. She fought an unwelcome impulse to rush to her supposed father and wrap her arms around him. Instead, she moved as far from Hendricks as she could get. Too many questions still needed answers for her to forgive James Leigh-Whittington so easily.
Could he truly be her father? Squint lines radiated from the tired eyes, and his skin had a careworn look, but the white hair and beard aged him most. Was there a face as young as Longan's hidden beneath all that hair?
She watched as he was shoved back onto the bunk and retied. Grief, illness, even excessive drink tended to age a person. Had he grieved? He said he believed she and her mother were dead all these years. Part of her wanted to believe him. The other part clung to the familiar bitterness and hate. If only they were alone and could talk. She wasn't about to discuss anything so personal in front of pig slime like Sleed Hendricks.
Yet, how much more time did they have?
"Are you truly. . .?" She couldn't say "my father." Instead, she said, "Are you James Leigh-Whittington?"
He smiled. "You were born in Blackhawk, but we didn't stay there any longer than anywhere else we lived in the gold camps. For your sixth birthday, I rode into Central City to buy you a doll. With a china head, hands, and feet. Your mother made it a dress to match one she'd made you."
Jenna blinked back tears. The dress had been a deep rose with a Mother Hubbard apron of cross-bar muslin in pale pink. The doll had been her most treasured possession and remained so. "Why did you think we were dead?"
He sighed. "I nearly died from the bullet I took when I jumped Hendricks. By the time—"
The marshal's crude laughter interrupted. "I can't tell you how glad I am to hear that."
"Stay out of this, damn you," Jenna yelled. Hendricks merely
smiled. She turned back to her father. "Go on."
"By the time I got back home, you and your mother were gone. Some miners had taken over the cabin. They told me the people who had lived there before had been killed by claim jumpers. No one else could tell me anything about what happened to you. All the people I’d known before I left had gone elsewhere, so I wired Benedict Treadwell. He wired back that I no longer had a wife or daughter. And fool that I am, I believed him."
The truth showed in his eyes. No use denying it. Yet, fifteen years of pain made it impossible to accept so easily. She thought of the day she had first met him. He had stared at her and cradled her hand in his as if it were something precious.
"Believe me, Eugenia, nothing could have kept me from returning to you and your mother, had I known you were alive."
Her gaze fell, and she averted her face. Her insides roiled with emotion. She had so much to say, to scream, at him. About how her mother had suffered. How she, Jenna, had suffered. The words wouldn't come. She stared at her booted feet, trying to sort out her feelings, until a growing awareness of Hendricks' intense scrutiny brought up her head.
The marshal leaned against the wall, the gun held loosely in his thick-knuckled hand, giving him a slothful look. But she could almost hear the whir of his brain calculating how to turn every nuance of the situation to his advantage.
He caught her gaze. The smile that twisted his thin, cruel lips sent a shudder of fear and revulsion down her spine.
"Longan," he said.
"Yeah?" Jake had finished binding Rembrandt and stood looking down at her with hungry, cunning eyes.
"Get down the trail a ways. Find a spot that gives you a clear view of the road without being seen by McCauley when he rides up. Soon as you see him, get your gawddamn ass back here on the double."
Jake went out, shutting the door behind him. Why hadn't Hendricks had her tied up as well? Jenna waited, her entire body tense, afraid she knew the answer.
Once Jake was gone, the marshal turned toward her. The way his gaze skimmed over her body told her that her fear was justified. Even the loose shirt, buttoned clear to her chin, failed to discourage his lecherous scrutiny. She glared at him, feeling dirty, as if he had already touched her. He grinned, staring pointedly at the crotch of her trousers while his hand stole down over his own. He walked to the bunk opposite the one she and her father inhabited and sank down.
He patted the spot next to him. "Why don't you come over here and we'll get better acquainted, eh, darlin'?"
"Don't call me that!" The endearment that had sounded so good coming from Branch came viler than the nastiest expletive on Hendricks' tongue.
The marshal's eyes narrowed. "I'll call you whatever I damned well please. Now, get over here."
"Leave her alone." Rembrandt took Jenna's hand.
With the speed of exploding dynamite, Hendricks came off the bed. His ham-like fist smashed into Rembrandt's jaw, crumpling him like an unshored mine tunnel in a quake.
"That wasn't necessary!" Jenna bent over the old man. He was out cold.
"You think not?" Hendricks countered. "Then get over here like I told you." He yanked her up by the arm and hauled her to the other bed.
"Let go of me!" She clawed at the hand gripping her arm, like trying to pry gold from a rocky crevice with nothing more than a toothpick.
He shoved her down and grinned as he laid her pistol on the floor beyond her reach, then removed his own gun belt. "Gonna have us some fun. Don't worry, there should be plenty of time before lover boy gets here."
She forced herself to lean back on her elbows, looking relaxed as she smiled tauntingly up at him. "You've got a rude surprise coming, Marshal."
"Yeah? What's that?" His fingers moved to the buttons of his fly. "Did McCauley lock a chastity belt on you or something?"
"No. You see, he just found out that I worked for the Pinkertons. Do you have any idea how much he hates Pinkertons, Marshal? Whatever McCauley might have felt for me before is history now. He hates my guts."
Hendricks' hands stilled. "What are you trying to tell me, girl?"
She laughed. The strained sound of it only added to the huskiness she tried to affect. "I'm telling you that you'd better come up with some other way to force McCauley to sign those papers, because he's more likely to offer to help throttle me than he is to sign away his life to save my hide."
The marshal stared down at her for a long time. Then he freed the last button and smiled. "Well, that don't mean we can't have a little fun while we wait for him, now does it? Get undressed."
"Go eat road apples." She lunged off the bed.
He caught her and threw her back down, this time hurling his thick, heavy body on top of her. The impact knocked the breath out of her. He had her shirt ripped open and was tearing at her camisole by the time she got her wind back and could move.
The smell of his breath, as fetid as the garbage the pigs looted in the streets of Park City, made her nauseous. She felt his soft paunch pressing into her and below that, something hard she didn't want to think about. His hands bore into the soft flesh of her shoulders, fighting to keep her beneath him as she bucked and twisted to get free. His mouth on her neck was like the kiss of a dead, waterlogged fish. She jerked aside when he tried to take her mouth, a sound of revulsion issuing from her throat.
"Don't like my mouth on you, eh, bitch?" he growled, breathless from the struggle. "I ain't put together no different than McCauley. I don't reckon I diddle no different neither."
She forced a laugh. "Except he doesn't have a thick sloppy gut. Or smell like last year's cesspool."
He slapped her hard. "Maybe that'll make you feel a bit friendlier, huh?"
"Not with a pig like you. Nothing would ever—"
"No? You'll feel different with my pecker in ya."
She pummeled him with her fists, spitting epithets in his sweating face that well described his squat, ugly body while she kicked at his legs with her booted feet.
Grunting, Hendricks reared back to escape her claws and belted her again, this time with his fist. She went limp, fighting the blackness that threatened to descend on her and giving the marshal time to unfasten her gun belt. He tossed it to the floor and yanked at the waistband of her trousers. Buttons scattered.
The blackness receded. Jenna called on every ounce of strength she had left and launched a new attack, viciously digging her thumbs into his eyes. He grabbed for her wrists. She let go long enough to evade his grasp, bucking sharply at the same time. Taken off guard, he rolled to the side. She brought up her knee and aimed for his groin.
Hendricks blocked the move with his own knee, barely keeping her from mashing his privates. "Little bitch, I'll make you sorry for that."
"Not as sorry as I'm gonna make you."
He reared back to hit her. Ducking, she dodged the blow and rammed him hard in his fat belly with her head. The air left him in a whoosh. She easily shoved him away and dove for the weapons he'd carefully laid on the floor.
Her hand had barely touched the handle of the Starr when his fingers knotted in her loose hair, yanking her head around. He clamped his other hand on her waist and got her on the bed again. The iron grip of one meaty hand pinched her wrists together and pinned them above her head. He chuckled throatily as he imprisoned her lower legs with one thick thigh and began working her trousers and the split-crotch drawers she'd worn instead of woollies down over her hips.
"Now, we'll see how tough you are, eh, little girl? Still think you can win?"
Sweat dripped from his head onto her nearly bared breasts as he bent to put his wet mouth to her skin. She shoved her hips deep into the feather tick, trying to keep him from stripping her pants off.
Over on his own bunk, Rembrandt groaned as he came around. He managed to sit up. Seeing what was happening, he cried, "Damn
you, Hendricks, you bastard, get off her!"
Hendricks' head came up, and he managed a dry chuckle. "Ain't gonna hurt her, Papa, only use her a little. Like your partner's already done, no doubt."
Jenna heard the other man's anguished moan, then a thud as he rolled onto the floor.
Hendricks interrupted his efforts to rid her of her trousers to run his hand over her bare abdomen. "Gawd, you feel better'n the inside of a sow's ear. You even smell good, and no stinky French stuff neither."
"Pig like you would be familiar with the feel of a sow, wouldn't you?" she hissed. Boot heels scraped on the floor and she knew her father was trying to get to her.
The marshal lowered his slobbering mouth toward hers. Gunfire erupted outside.
Hendricks leaped to his feet, cursing. He grabbed up Jenna's gun as well as his own and made for the door, forgetting his pants were undone. They slid off his round paunch and sagging buttocks to tangle around his knees. With a thud, he fell facedown and came back up almost as fast. Trying to hold in his belly so he could look himself over, he swore. "Damn that frigging Longan! If I got splinters in me, he's gonna wish he was dead."
"He's probably already dead." There weren't enough buttons left to secure Jenna's pants. She buckled on her empty gun belt to keep the baggy garment from falling around her ankles. "That's McCauley out there. Pretty soon you'll be the one wishing you were dead, Hendricks."
"Shut up!" He managed to get the stained trousers up. Then he hurried to the dusty window and peeked out.
Jenna went to her father and helped get him back on the bed.
"Are you all right?" He looked her over.
She blushed and pulled her torn camisole together, then knotted the tails of her shirt beneath her breasts.
"He'll pay for what he did to you, Eugenia. I swear he will."
"Don't worry about that now."
From outside came a voice. "You in the cabin, come out before I fill it and you both full of lead."
"Who the hell are you?" Hendricks shouted back. "And what’s your business here?"
"I'm the man who just killed your bushwhacking cohort back there on the road. Now I know you're holding Jenna Leigh-Whittington in there. Send her out and, if she's all right, maybe you and me'll negotiate a truce."
"You're butting into a matter what don't concern you, mister. I'm U.S. Marshal Sleed Hendricks. The girl's in my custody. I suggest you get back down the mountain and mind your own business."
"That's Tuttle!" Jenna said.
Hendricks swung around to face her. "Who'd you say?"
"Jason Tuttle. He's a Pinkerton agent."
"Drat! I know Tuttle. He's a damn good shot."
Jenna smiled. "Getting nervous, Marshal?"
"He's the one better get nervous. He can't get near this place without stepping out in clear sight. When he does, I'll be ready." He went back to watching out the small window.
Tuttle called out again. "What do you say we talk this over, Marshal? Come on out. I'll meet you halfway."
"All right. You show yourself first. If you're who you say you are, we'll powwow like you said."
The tension in the cabin coagulated like spilled blood as Jenna and her father waited to see what would happen. Hendricks made no move toward the door. He had his gun drawn and cocked, his shoulder and part of his back pressed to the log wall beside the window. Every few seconds he glanced at the pair on the bed, giving Jenna little opportunity to rush him.
She surveyed the cabin for possible weapons. If Tuttle distracted the marshal long enough, she might have a chance. Her gaze lit on a shovel leaning against the wall a few feet from the bed. Hope soared. She readied her body for quick action, then waited for the next moment when Hendricks turned back to the window.
Before she could move, he chuckled, raised his gun, and fired. The cry of pain that followed told Jenna to move, fast. She dove for the shovel.
Hendricks saw her as her fingers closed over the rough wooden handle. He leveled the gun at her head then edged the muzzle away, aiming at Rembrandt instead. "Drop it, bitch, or your papa's a dead goose."
The shovel clattered to the floor.
He motioned for them to join him at the door. "You're going out first. Come on."
Jenna helped Rembrandt to his feet. "How do you expect him to walk with his feet tied?"
Hendricks cursed. He waved the gun at her. "Get away from him, over there in the comer."
When she'd done as he said, the marshal took out his knife. He kept the gun on her as he went to Rembrandt and with one quick slice, cut the rope. Then he backed quickly away. "Now get over here."
They preceded him out the door, blinking in the sunlight so bright after the dimness of the cabin. Jenna squinted and made out the prone figure of agent Tuttle in the same blue shirt and black trousers he'd worn yesterday, lying on the ground across the clearing.
Hendricks approached the man cautiously, both guns drawn. He kept his two prisoners in front of him like a shield until he saw that Tuttle was wounded but still alive. Blood seeped from a bullet hole in the agent's right shoulder.
"Get his gun and toss it into the bushes," Hendricks ordered Jenna. "Don't get no ideas. I've got one gun aimed right at your old papa's head."
She threw the Colt as far as she could, hoping it landed in the road on the other side of the scrub oaks, in case Branch didn't know what he was riding into. If he spotted the gun, he would suspect trouble.
"Now get him on his feet," Hendricks said.
Tuttle groaned as Jenna helped him up. He leaned on her heavily, the palm of his left hand pressed tightly against the hole in his shoulder to stop the bleeding. "Something told me not to trust him, even if he is a marshal," Tuttle muttered, adding an ugly expletive.
Hendricks directed them toward the mine. "We might as well take a look-see at my new mine while we're waiting for McCauley to show."
Jenna scowled at him. "It's not yours yet. McCauley's smart. And fast. He didn't get his reputation skipping pebbles across a creek, you know. He won't be as easy to handle as an old man and a woman."
"I took care of him, didn't I?" Hendricks gestured at the Pinkerton.
"Tuttle isn't Branch McCauley, either. And you're forgetting that you've lost your henchman. With Jake, you might've had a chance, but alone against McCauley. . ."
She let the sentence hang, leaving it to his imagination to complete.
Hendricks laughed. He aimed one six-gun at her head, the other at Rembrandt's. "I don't need Jake or anyone else."
He took them to Drift No. 2. The lock had already been sprung. By a crowbar, Jenna thought, judging from the gouges left in the thick oak planks that formed the door. A kerosene lantern hung from a nail just inside. On the floor below sat a tin canister of matches, a box of white tallow candles, and three miner's candle holders with sharp spikes for embedding them into wooden braces.
At the marshal's instructions, Jenna crouched to fetch matches from the canister to light the lantern. With her back to Hendricks, she slipped a candle holder inside her shirt, thinking it might make a good weapon. Then she stood up, took down the lantern, set the wick aflame, and adjusted the mantle.
The yellow glow provided them a mere twenty feet of visibility. Jenna studied the rough rock walls of the tunnel. Thick, horizontal timbers supported the ceiling, wedged in place every eight feet by vertical braces. Deep in the darkness, she heard the echoing plunk-plunk of water droplets falling from overhead. The walls shone wet in the light, attesting to the high-water content of the mountain soil, the miner's worst bane in Utah's Wasatch Mountains.
She turned and offered the lantern to Hendricks. He would have to put one of the guns away before taking it. She might get a chance to jump him.
Hendricks chuckled. "No, you hang onto that." He brandished the two revolvers. "I've got these."
With Rembrandt supporting the Pinkerton, and Jenna beside Tuttle carrying the lantern, they started into the eight-foot-wide tunnel. Hendricks followed.
To Jenna, it seemed that they walked for miles. Now and then they passed a yawning black hole she assumed to be a side drift. The deeper they went, the colder the air became on her skin, damp with the sweat of fear. The walls began to close in on her. She flinched at a noise in the darkness, expecting a mouse or a rat to run up her leg.
"Branch stumbled on this claim accidentally, oh, well, over a year ago now," Rembrandt said. She glanced over at him, grateful for the distraction he purposely provided.
"He’d come out to find me at the time," he went on. "He sat down on an outcropping to rest and noticed black galena and green copper streaking the gray granite. He chipped off a piece and had it assayed. It didn't prove out to be half as good as the Flagstaff 's first assay, but we've done all right. And we've never had a cave-in. You're as safe here as back in the hotel."
"That may be, but I'd still rather be there than here," she muttered. "Hendricks, how do you expect to get McCauley from way back in here?"
"You'll see."
"Can't you let me wait for him? You could hide in the shadows and keep your gun on me. I'll get him to sign the papers, then tell him to meet me back in town."
"Forget it, little girl. I owe McCauley, and I ain't forgetting about it."
"What do you owe him?" she persisted.
"Three years ago, I was a crack shot, every bit as good as him. We had a disagreement over the ownership of a wagon-load of gold ore and he shot me, the puking bastard. Bullet smashed my wrist. I had to learn to shoot all over again. I can shoot damn good now with my left hand but not as good as I used to with my right. McCauley's gonna pay for that."
"Killing him won't help you shoot any better."
"Maybe not, but it'll make me feel damned good, seeing the life go outta the sonuvabitch."
Their voices echoed eerily. Up ahead, the light played over solid rock. They had come to the end, Jenna thought. But when they drew close, she saw that the tunnel made an abrupt turn to the right.
"Why does the tunnel veer off like this?" she asked.
"It's called a drift, not a tunnel," Rembrandt said. "We try to follow the vein. Sometimes we lose it and must angle off to the side to find it again. A bend like the one we just passed is called a turned house. Most of the crosscuts slant downward to channel off water. They don't go anywhere, only a few dozen yards deep usually. Some stay pretty much flooded, especially in the spring. The vein in this drift never proved to be worth much."
"Is that why you have two tunnels? Drifts, I mean."
"The other drift is our first and main one, but even there the vein is thin, and the ore's not particularly rich. Branch hired an expert who advised us to try over here."
Hendricks chuckled behind them. "And you found somethin' you didn't quite expect and don’t want to admit to, didn't you, Leigh-Whittington?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"No? Well, we'll soon see, won't we?"
They walked on in silence. Tuttle stumbled. Jenna sagged under his weight as she caught him. With one arm around his waist, she held the lantern out to the side as far as she could to avoid catching
her clothes on fire from the heat. "Are you all right?"
"Been better." More softly, Tuttle whispered, "What would happen if that lantern went out?"
Rembrandt answered, "We'd be as blind as bats."
"Why're you whispering?" Hendricks demanded.
"We're trying to figure how to get the best of you, of course," Jenna told him.
"Yeah? Well, you're wasting your time."
"Maybe." Jenna wasn't sure she could stand being submerged in complete darkness so deep in the bowels of the earth. As it was, it took every ounce of courage she could summon to keep going. They could wind up lost in there forever. Merely thinking about it raised gooseflesh on her skin. It also gave her an idea.
Where was Branch? Would he care that she was in danger? Or could there be more truth than she wanted to consider in her taunt to the marshal about McCauley choosing to help torture her rather than saving her life? Having Branch turn against her had hurt more than she'd ever expected, yet didn’t compare to the pain that tore her heart at the thought of his being killed. Somehow, she had to get out of this mess and warn him. She wished she knew more about what Hendricks planned.
Speaking over her shoulder, she said, "I still don't understand how you think coming in here gives you an advantage, Marshal. Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"I said you'd find out. Now, shut up and hold that lantern higher. I can't see five frigging feet the way you're holding it."
She lifted it as high as she could. Within a few minutes her arm began to ache. Up ahead, something sparkled in the faint light.
"We're nearly there," Rembrandt said.
"Where?"
"The end of the drift."
Her voice was too shaky to ask anything more. The end of the road. Would Hendricks kill them now? If his plan was to ambush Branch from inside the drift, there would be no need for him to keep them alive any longer. Her belly felt stuffed with giant worms, all writhing and wriggling inside her. Bile filled her throat. She swallowed down her fear and kept her feet moving, despite her knees that threatened to buckle under her.
A few moments later all thoughts fled her mind as the lantern light revealed a twinkling fairyland in front of them. "What is that?"
She heard Rembrandt's deep sigh and knew he hadn’t wanted to come this far. Whatever lay ahead explained the heavy padlock on the thick door at the opening of the drift. And the reason Sleed Hendricks so desperately wanted ownership of the Silver Bullion Mine.
"It's a vug," Hendricks said.
"A vug?" She expected Rembrandt to answer, but he remained silent.
"An underground cavern," Hendricks explained. "A giant geode lined inside with crystals of precious minerals."
"The schoolteacher back home had a geode," Jenna retorted. "It was a hollow rock no bigger than my fist. He used it as a paperweight."
"Well, this one's bigger."
If not for the vertical strip of phosphorus glowing in the lantern light at the left-hand comer of the drift, it would have appeared to be a dead end. When they reached it, Jenna saw a fair-sized opening veering sharply to the left.
"Three feet more to the right and we'd have missed this completely," Rembrandt said in a flat tone, as if he wished they had.
"Lucky for me you didn't." Hendricks cackled.
They stepped into a room roughly eight feet long, six feet wide, and ten feet high. The walls flashed and shimmered with millions of multi-colored crystals—white, black, yellow, and deep blue. Black-encrusted flakes of silver and others of pure gold gave off blinding reflections of light like rays of the sun caught by a mirror.
Jenna turned in a circle on the rough floor, which had already been cleared of its treasure. Her mouth hung open as she stared in awe at the round, bejeweled walls. The lantern light cast wild shadows over the jagged surface as she moved, adding to the ghostly, phantasmic ambience.
"Good Lord," Tuttle muttered. "There must be a fortune here."
"It's mostly silver, but there's gold, lead, and zinc, too," Rembrandt said.
Hendricks stood at the entrance, seemingly struck dumb by the sight. He began to chuckle. The echoing peels of his laughter grew and took on a maniacal tone. "No wonder you boarded up the entrance and kept this secret."
Moving farther into the room, he used the nose of his gun to pry loose a chunk of white quartz bearing black and silver crystals. He held it up like a prize goblet full of wine in a mock toast to his hostages. "I'm gonna be the wealthiest sonuvabitch in the valley. All thanks to the two bastards I hate most. Ain't that rich? All I gotta do now is hide in one of them cross-cuts and wait for McCauley to come looking for you three."
They turned to look at him, but he saw only the treasure embedded in the craggy walls and domed ceiling. The moment Jenna prayed for had arrived.
In one smooth, swift movement, she swung her arm in a wide arc. The light flickered wildly. Her fingers straightened, releasing the wire handle. The lantern flew across the room, slamming squarely into Hendricks' rotund chest.
He howled with pain and fear as the glass bowl broke, spilling flaming kerosene over him. The weapon he held clattered to the floor. Frantically, he danced and gyrated, slapping at the flames that engulfed his shirt and trousers.
Jenna dove for the six-gun and felt a sharp jab of pain beneath her left breast as she hit ground. Leaving Tuttle to fend for himself, Rembrandt shoved the screaming marshal to the floor. He rolled Hendricks' thick body over and over, smothering the flames. The last spark died quickly, submerging the underground chamber in terrifying, impenetrable darkness.